Seth Borenstein of the AP has a pretty great piece knocking down all the nonsense about “global cooling” that the Washington Post op-ed page and others have been pressing:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press. […] In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

[…] Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Unfortunately, I see the piece bylined as “By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer” which makes me worry it’ll be buried in newspapers’ science sections (or not seen at all since lots of papers barely do science coverage at all these days) rather than front-and-center in politics sections where it belongs. This story is about a key piece of propaganda being put out by political actors in order to win a political fight. It’s a political story.

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